Geoffrey Canada, Founder & CEO of Harlem Children’s Zone

Geoffrey Canada CEO of New York’s Harlem Children’s Zone has helped shape a new direction in education with his celebrated school and prominent role in Davis Guggenheim’s moving documentary Waiting for Superman. We recently had a conversation with Mr. Canada on some of the issues affecting education reform.

TOC: Mr. Canada, if you were entering the workforce today as a new teacher, what would you look for in a school?  Where would you look to start your career?

Mr. Canada: I think the thing that I would look for is a place that has a group of other professional teachers who could help me really master my craft.

One of the things I would say to newly-minted teachers is you want to find schools that embrace teaching and the science of teaching and that are prepared to help young teachers learn that science by supporting them, sharing with them, and working with them.

You want to look for a collaborative spirit, a place where there is a sense of hope and where there is a real passion for educating and helping children.

TOC: What measures do you use to determine whether a teacher is doing his/her job?

Mr. Canada: We do this by using data.  We collect data on our kids throughout their entire year.  So when the school year starts, we know how an individual class has performed.  Let’s say you have a class that has 75% of the children on grade level for math.  Then at the end of the year, if you have done a decent job, we expect to have 75% of the kids on grade level.  If you’ve done a really good job, you might have 85 or 90% of the kids on grade level.  If you’ve done a really lousy job, you might have 60 or 65% of those kids on grade level.

One of the reasons this is important is that we want our best teachers to go to our most challenging students and classrooms.   We want to have our biggest rewards go to teachers who are prepared to work with the most challenging students versus what usually happens which is your best teachers end up working with the kids who are performing at the highest academic levels, when the kids who are performing at the lowest academic levels really need your best teachers.

TOC: What is the biggest problem facing teaching today?

Mr. Canada: I think the biggest problem is really the incorporation of the use of data in terms of daily instruction and differentiating instruction, how we teach the children who are at very different levels in terms of their academic readiness or preparedness.  And both of those things, I think, are absolutely critical and somewhat complex.

Getting data regularly, analyzing that data, and using that data to determine strategies inside a classroom, we think, are absolutely critical.

TOC: Why have your schools been successful where others have failed?

Mr. Canada: I think there are a couple of reasons.  The first is that we’re open 11 months a year.  We think that kids who are struggling actually need more time on task to help them catch up.

The second reason is that we hold the adults accountable. We think that the most important measure of the classes’ and the school’s success is actually the teachers and the administrators in those individual classrooms and individual schools.

We want to make sure we give our educators all the support they need during the school year, but we also decide who is  able to really move the needle for kids and who is not.  And when you’re not able to really help kids be successful, then you’re not able to stay in our schools.

One of the real challenges in schools like ours is that we don’t really tolerate failure.

The third piece of the puzzle is that we provide a range of after-school and other support services for children.  So we have free medical and dental support inside our schools; we have social-work support; and we have great sports and arts programs inside the schools.

TOC: Why do we need charter schools?

Mr. Canada: Well, I think charter schools are really the R&D end of education.  So much of public education is hampered by rules and regulations that they cannot experiment and try out new ideas.  And the idea with charter schools is that they can try new ideas and see which work.  And when you find key things that work, the question is how do you share those with the larger education-community?

And so charter schools are fairly efficient ways, in my opinion, of trying to figure out what strategies would help groups of kids where there’s been long histories of failure.

TOC: And finally, what three things can be done now to reform failing schools?

Mr. Canada: The first is that we’ve got to reform some of the work rules. We’ve got to make sure that we bring the best teachers into the schools that we keep the best teachers, and that we just don’t simply terminate or retain teachers on the basis of seniority, but on the basis of performance.

The second is that we’ve got to experiment with the length of the school day and the length of the school year.  Many of our students just need more time on task.

And the third is that we’ve got to figure out how to bring the other supports for education into our schools.  How do we bring great social services, great art programs, and great sports programs into our schools?  We must integrate all of those into our overall philosophy on education in schools.

Thank you Mr. Canada for your time and we thank you for your service to the community.

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